Yahoo search employees – here is how you can make the best of your product and retire with millions

So by now I think everyone knows that Microsoft made a “deal” with Yahoo to run search on Yahoo websites.  This is still waiting for regulatory approval, but chances are it will be fine since the two behemoths are not exactly merging and the combined search market of Yahoo and Microsoft is only around 35%. The word from inside Yahoo Search is that they will keep on developing their search engine for now while they wait for the final approval.  No one is fired as of now but most people in search are understandably dejected that their product is essentially being scrapped.  Personally, I think this is a perfect time for the codemonkeys in Yahoo to band together and use their search engine for one last hurrah.

I used to work for a leading shopping comparison engine that has  significantly less traffic than Yahoo, but that is where I learned about how much money a website could potentially make even if it has a miniature slice of the giant internet pie. (At that time the company I worked for had only 0.2% of all search traffic).   The Yahoo search engine supposedly has 20% of the search market, so the codemonkeys that control it really have some serious power.  Here are some of the ways they could “experiment” with the search engine in the next few months for their own profit:

• Change search results for products to websites that pay commissions and embed their own affiliate codes in the links.  By my estimate from my past experience in shopping comparison, these Yahoos only need to sign up as an affiliate for just a few major merchants and leave it running for one day to generate millions.
• Create websites with various content and manually rank them high on the Yahoo search engine.  Drive traffic to these personal websites and get advertising dollars.  This probably would not make money as quickly as tactic one, but it will build up a website very quickly and possibly generate revenue for years to come.

Are these tactics unethical?  I don’t think they are if the search engine still finds results that are relevant to the person making the query. In fact, both Microsoft and Google manually rank many search results for various reasons so it isn’t exactly a democratic process anyway.  The creators of the search engines can and do control what you see on top.  Is it an inappropriate use of company property?  Perhaps, but it may also be beneficial to Yahoo to see the results of the experiment and see if there is a business opportunity there. The worst thing that could happen is that the Yahoos will be fired.

The chances of this actually happening is fairly low since it would require  source and data changes, and releases of software the size  of the Yahoo search engine  would take the coordination of a good sized team of engineers.  When you have to involve so many people in such a project to subvert a giant corporation it is not likely to happen.   However, if they manage to actually do it correctly and let it last for a few months until the Yahoo search algorithms are taken offline then  they will probably all be rich enough to retire.    Anyway, if this happens and Yahoo search employees retire with millions in commissions or advertising money I would ask that they let me write the book on it.  It would be the ultimate Office Space sequel, and it would be hilarious.

Now my  serious comment on this whole deal is  that it is better for the internet as a whole that Yahoo is consolidating its search with Microsoft instead of Google.  If Google owned 85% to 90% of the search market then they will wield even more power than they do now.  With that much market share Google will not have any incentive to improve their product, and they will have way too much power over what internet publishers do.  Even now Google is able to bully website owners into drop certain types of advertising with the threat of banning from their search engine.  Competition is good, and  I was hoping that Yahoo would beat Google for a while since I have been using Yahoo since it was still hosted at akebono.stanford.edu.  Right now I sincerely hope that the Yahoo Search employees do well after this whole deal is over and perhaps start a few new companies here.

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